Paul Sutton @zleap@qoto.org

Looking for electronic gifts for people who need technology help? I write a LOT of books in the Take Control series—on privacy, security, networking, messaging, calendars and contacts, cables and connections, and a lot more. Buy an ebook; send it with a fancy note to your friend, relative, or colleague! You can find all my titles here! https://www.takecontrolbooks.com/?orderby=date&paged=1&s=Glenn+Fleishman&post_type=product As well as all Take Control books at this link https://www.takecontrolbooks.com/catalog/

It's been 300 days since start of the war in #Ukraine, and its people are far from buckling 🇺🇦🤝🇵🇱

#СлаваУкраїні!

This #artwork was created for charity, helping evacuate queer Mariupol youth & creatives. We collected close to £1k pounds.

Hello! This seems to be the place where all the cool kids are going and I'm excited to be here. My name is Rebecca Dart and my day job is an animation art director here in Vancouver, British Columbia, but my side hustle is paleoart. I also have a passion for plants, particularly plants of prey.

#introduction

1/ A few thoughts on the 'artists promoting their work' discussion: most creators you follow are not wealthy people. Writing a book does not make you rich. Being a talented painter does not make you rich. A lot of us are scrambling to pay our bills and we HATE it. We hate the hustle & posting links to storefronts. But we are also busy AF trying to survive doing 12 different jobs. If you don't like "ads" know that we hate them too - but otherwise the work doesn't get made. It's that simple.

Big tech lobbying, revolving doors, institutional corruption etc are now happening at a scale that mirrors what big oil, tobacco, finance, defense and other industries have been doing for ages.

You cannot take funding from big tech and just claim "but I am independent" anymore.

An irregular reminder that calling this place "Mastodon" has a bit similar energy as saying "I just sent you a GMail."

"Fediverse" (or "fedi") is a better term.

Mastodon is just one of many software projects that talk to each other to create this multi-instance social network:
https://axbom.com/fediverse/

(kudos to @axbom for this fantastic infographic!)

There are blogs, Reddit-like communities, video instances and many more, all part of fedi.

#TwitterMigration #NewHere

It’s worth noting that investors are starting to turn on Elon not because of his embrace of conspiratorial reactionaries or his opening Twitter up to ever more hate and harassment, they’re turning on him because he did the one thing they can’t forgive: he’s losing them money.

Basic Vim Commands Every Linux User Must Know

https://linuxhandbook.com/basic-vim-commands/
#vim

Game devs it’s time to show me your cool shit. Reply with something cool you’re doing.

9 million Mastodon accounts is extremely likely this month.

According to my math, an average of 1,115 new accounts per hour over the next 10 days would be needed to reach this milestone.

During the last hour, 1,780 new Mastodon accounts were made.

Tech giants are now spending hundreds of millions to systematically shape policy across the world, including donations and funding to policymakers, civil society orgs, media orgs and academia.

A decade ago, this may not have been clear to everyone. Now it really should be.

Three Quarters of Major Observatories Affected by Light Pollution

https://ras.ac.uk/news-and-press/research-highlights/three-quarters-major-observatories-affected-light-pollution

Search over 1,000 astronomy and space news releases at www.stars-n-stuff.com/news-stories

#astronomy #space #science #news #stargazing

Image: Own work, via Night Cafe Studio

Link to your CodePen from Mastodon — and from your Mastodon to CodePen — and verified you shall be.

Oh. my. god.

Madison Square Garden used facial recognition to identify and stop a mom from attending a Christmas show with her kid because she's an attorney at a firm who is engaged in litigation with them.

This is why it's not enough to just ban government and law enforcement use of #facialrecognition. There are so many ways private companies and even individuals can abuse #biometric #surveillance tech.

#BanFacialRecognition entirely. Yesterday.

https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/msgs-facial-recognition-stops-mom-from-attending-christmas-show-with-child/4004471/

This is great. Postal delivery vehicles do a relatively small number of miles in a day and then return to a central facility every night. Obvious candidate for electrification https://about.usps.com/newsroom/national-releases/2022/1220-usps-intends-to-deploy-over-66000-electric-vehicles-by-2028.htm

Why is it that 99% of the time someone is asking for "a simple answer to a simple question", I have to ask them to more-fully specify their question?

It's like, "I can *probably* give you a simple answer to a well-defined question or I can give you a heavily-caveated and multi-pronged reply to a poorly-defined question."

Ah, the good, old "conservation of complexity" problem.

Video of the train derailment in Collegedale - originally posted on facebook, but I prefer twitter links still.

This massive oversized concrete girder is being delivered to the new road project to the upper left of the prior overhead shot. In fact, that appears to be the truck entering the work zone.

Huge delay incoming. These are supposed to be escorted loads. Just absolutely devastating overall besides the 2 reported injuries.

https://twitter.com/TheTNHoller/status/1605293927028125697

I just got and accepted an offer to become a junior embedded software engineer! It took family, mentors at my company, people on Twitter when I belonged there and also many kind people on Mastodon.

@PHolder, I specifically was able to draw on the unit testing discussion and my attempts at C programming from advent of code during our interview. I can’t thank you enough!

#softwareEngineering #embedded

STATEMENT: Harrowing incident at Madison Square Garden shows why lawmakers should ban the use of facial recognition in all places of public accommodation, such as bars, restaurants, and venues https://www.fightforthefuture.org/news/2022-12-20-breaking-madison-square-garden-uses-facial-recognition-to-bar-mom-from-attending-christmas-concert-with-her-daugher

Hi there! This is ACM, the world's largest computing society. As you might have noticed, we have opened not only our official #Mastodon account but also our own #instance!

Please consider joining @mastodon.acm.org, a community for #computing researchers & practitioners to connect & exchange ideas with each other, whether you are an ACM member or not.

You can use this link to join: https://mastodon.acm.org/invite/FbXaxAHg

Spread the word with your friends and colleagues! Happy tooting!